Products, services, and companies offering them in display booths at trade shows and the like are commonly identified by headers, strips of paper, cloth or plastic mounted on a frame, often by means of magnetic strips or strips of Velcro (hook and loop fasteners) secured to and around one side of the header adjacent margins of the header and held by a complementarily configured fastener strip secured to the frame. Such a display is illustrated in FIG. 1 of U.S. Pat. No. 5,058,359. The frames themselves are often 6 to 10 feet long and 12 to 18 inches high. If each of the horizontal frame member is made as one continuous piece, the members are, for practical purposes, unportable. If they are made in separate pieces, they are liable to get lost or damaged, and fasteners or fittings used to assemble them are also inconvenient and liable to be lost.
The frame of this invention is described as a header frame, with long horizontal members and relatively short vertical members. However, the frame is really a versatile graphics carrier or showpiece. It may be used, for example, in a free-standing panel with relatively long vertical members and horizontal members that can be somewhat longer proportionally than the vertical members of the illustrative embodiment, which panel can be used by itself or in combination with other such panels to form a wall display. A frame of this invention can also be used in a bridge panel. Thus, although the long members are called horizontal members and the shorter members vertical members for convenience in describing the frame as a header frame in the description and claims, the terms "horizontal" and "vertical" are to be considered the equivalent of "longer" and "shorter".
One of the objects of this invention is to provide a graphic carrier frame or the like that is strong, attractive, and foldable, and that requires no fasteners, fittings, or other extraneous parts.
Other objects will become apparent to those skilled in the art in the light of the following description and accompanying drawing.